This is a writeup of today's Center for Civic Media lunch event. If you're in the Cambridge area, come join us!

Today's Civic lunch featured the digital team from the Boston Globe, led by Jeff Moriarty, VP of Digital Products. He was joined by Chris Marstall, Marck Chang, and Grace Woo. They've just launched a new standalone site for the Globe, spinning off from the Boston.com portal and its ubiquitous popup ads. It's not a redesign -- they got to design a newspaper site from scratch in the year 2011, and the benefits of having a blank slate are evident in their award-winning design (here's more background on that design from some of its designers).

In our ongoing quest to trace the outline of the phrase "civic media," we began the Center for Civic Media's 2012 lunch series with Paul Wright, Editor and Cofounder of Prison Legal News, and executive director of the Human Rights Defense Center, the non-profit umbrella which publishes PLN.

This is a collaborative blog post between Hailey Lee and I about our final project for CMS.360, Intro to Civic Media. Our project is entitled “Television Newsroom Diversity and Civic Engagement.”

Abstract

We sat down for a Thursday Civic lunch with Biko Baker, Executive Director of the League of Young Voters.

Like any good organizer, Biko begins with his Story of Self. He grew up in Milwaukee, WI, with a father who was a machinist and construction worker, and a mother who worked at the grocery store. He was a jock, and didn't grow into being an academic until his sophomore year at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. He did his graduate work at UCLA in History, and labor. He became a researcher for the SEIU, but was also into hip hop, and got started as a party promoter on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, working with many of hip hop's biggest West Coast names, like Snoop Dogg and Xzibit. He and his fellow promoters were essentially organizing online, developing massive email and text lists and relationships without realizing this practice had a name. Biko also wrote for The Source, one of hip hop's top magazines.

For a recent Civic Media Lunch, we welcomed the co-founder and radio coordinator from ZUMIX, Madeleine Steczynski and Elena Botkin-Levy. ZUMIX is a twenty-year-old East Boston-based nonprofit that builds community through music and the arts. Their core constituency is low-income youth -- picture a Boys and Girls Club filled with kids playing guitars and learning to use mixing boards...

Last Thursday at the Center for Civic Media, we heard a talk by Christina Xu, Chancellor of the Institute on Higher Awesome Studies, the non-profit wing of my favourite funding organisation, the Awesome Foundation. Christina formerly worked for the Center for Civic Media, and the Institute for Higher Awesome has been funded by the Knight Foundation to start the Awesome News Taskforce increasing awesomeness in communities and the world. Christina joined us to talk about the values of the Awesome Foundation, and to share an update on her work to bring Awesome to Detroit.